When I studied United States history in high school, there were two assigned texts: a survey book and J. Edgar Hoover's "Masters of Deceit".
It observed that "the following Communists are all alive & hibernating the ensuing list being headed by Hitler and concluded "The Communists are indeed 'The Masters of Deceit".
Meanwhile, other kids will become masters of deceit and will brag about their slyness when they get older ("Then there was the time I smuggled in dog urine").
But Hoover remained vigilant: of all the enemies that he had hunted, he considered the agents of Communism the "Masters of Deceit," as he called his 1958 best-selling book about them.
When I was a 10th-grade American history student in a Dallas public high school in 1964, J. Edgar Hoover's "Masters of Deceit," an anti-Communist tract, was required reading.
If you look around, you find that practically every social convention is hypocrisy: atheists make a rigid religion of unbelief; the news media (and all experts, without exception) are masters of deceit; the gay rights movement and feminism cloak a fierce determination to suppress disagreement; the war on terrorism is no nobler than any of the other savageries celebrated in human history.
To be an American is to be a master of belligerent self-deceit, and so, in true Trickster fashion, we point our fingers and our guns at the evil coyote, the devilish Trickster, and say, "We hate him!" in hopes that, in so doing, we will prove that we are nothing like him.
Accusing Qian and a pair of Spanish art dealers of being "modern masters of forgery and deceit", US attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement that the charges against the trio "paint a picture of perpetual lies and greed".
They are now a symbol of deceit, something that the Russian leader has mastered.
